my refusal to introduce him to my family, I grudgingly took the book mom handed me. “Just read the first twenty-five pages,” she’d said. “I promise, you’ll like it.”
I’d looked at them before, of course. I’d stolen one or two and riffled through them, looking for the sexy parts. But this time I opened the book and began reading from chapter one. Before I knew it, I’d read the entire thing from start to finish. To my surprise and perhaps horror, I found out that I liked it. Really liked it. It was full of love and hate and angst and drama and hot sex. I wasn’t entirely certain my mom should’ve let me read it, but I wanted another one right away. An addict had been created. I devoured romance novels at nearly the rate my mom had. Only I had schoolbooks to read, too, and school was my first priority. I was going to be a doctor, after all.
The medical-doctor thing didn’t work out. Turns out I hated math and science—oh, and blood, and life-and-death-type stress, and a hundred other things medical doctors have to deal with on daily basis. I got straight As in all my classes, but my two favorite subjects, the ones where I got A++’s, were History and English. I could never decide which one I liked more so I continued to enjoy both of them. I did have a favorite teacher, however: my English teacher, Mrs. Neilson. She was quirky and smart and wore caftans and her hair up in a bun on the top of her head with pencils sticking out, and she sometimes spoke in a fake British accent for no reason. She made books come alive.
It was Mrs. Neilson who discovered my secret addiction to romance novels, and like any responsible adult who spots a burgeoning addict, she’d saved me. I’d been sitting at my desk in her Honors English class when I pulled up my book bag to get out my English notebook, and the romance novel I was currently reading went flying across the slick tile floor to land at Mrs. Neilson’s feet. The teacher who was my mentor, the person I most looked up to in the world, leaned down and picked up the book. I held out my hand, expecting to get a mild reprimand for not concentrating on The Grapes of Wrath. She marched over to me and stared at the novel with an arched brow, holding it up by the corner as if it were a dead bug she needed to dispose of.
“Oh, Meg, I expect much greater things from you. Not reading this trash.” There it was. That word. Trash. Trash? I’d heard that word before. Many times. It was always spoken right after the words ‘trailer park’ and made my stomach tie into knots. If romance novels were trash, I didn’t want anything to do with them.
I’d gone home that day, pushed the book back onto Mom’s towering pile and never touched one again. Well, not for years at least. Not until college, when I’d been home on break, visited Ellie at the University of Wisconsin, and saw her reading one. Not only did she readily admit to reading them, she had them strewn all over her dorm room. Ellie and I talked about our favorites and shared them. But our love of them was like my dirty secret.
After that episode in English class, I’d been ashamed. Completely embarrassed. I slunk around, convinced Mrs. Neilson had lost all faith in me, despite my perfect grades and the fact that she’d told me on more than one occasion that I was a gifted writer. Two weeks later, Mrs. Neilson pushed a copy of Pride and Prejudice in front of me. She leaned down and whispered, “If you like to read love stories, read this one. It’s literature.” And that’s when my affair with the book began. Pride and Prejudice: the acceptable, smart person’s version of a romance novel. Worthy of a future doctor. A Ph.D.
Of course, Pride and Prejudice was just as fantastical a story as any of the romance novels I’d read. In real life, super-rich men who owned estates and held titles didn’t sweep you off your feet and tell you how ardently they admired and loved you. They didn’t pay off bad men to marry your flighty sister and save her from a life of ruin. And they certainly didn’t see the error of their ways and change as a